Spot.us

Spot.us. Interesting initiative in the U.S. The About us section reads…

Spot.Us is a nonprofit project of the “Center for Media Change” and funded by various groups like the Knight Foundation. We partner with various organizations including the Annenberg School of Communications in Los Angeles.

We are an open source project to pioneer “community powered reporting.” Through Spot.Us the public can commission and participate with journalists to do reporting on important and perhaps overlooked topics. Contributions are tax deductible and we partner with news organizations to distribute content under appropriate licenses. Donors can also take a survey from our one our sponsors, when available, to support the story of their choice at no cost to them.

Ive often wondered if there were a team of independent, well trained VJs – self equipped with cam, sound gear and laptop editing and who had a core network for sharing info and stories – would a production model like this be viable for independent news/features production? Possibly so – would be even better if the core network had experienced producers/editors to vet the content and confirm its credibility – it would certainly make it more viable ( I think anyway)